How would the environmental movement survive without real or imaginary environmental crises, without fears or imminent threats? In my latest article I explained that today’s environmentalism is nothing but a sad degeneration of the welcomed original environmental movement, which has been gradually infiltrated and contaminated by sinister ideologies, by pagan fanaticism, and obviously by money (lots of money). I summarized today’s environmentalism as a convenient sum of fears and fallacies that suffocates scientific data with constant propaganda. This propaganda is transmitted through the media which, with few exceptions, treat these matters with ideological bias, gross ignorance and the conformity of political correctness. One of the most common fears put forward by today’s environmentalism is the threat of the increase in sea level caused by the rapid melting of the planet’s ice sheets.
The planet’s ice reserves (the Arctic, the glaciers, Greenland and the Antarctic) are unevenly distributed. If Arctic’s ice volume equals 1, glaciers’ ice is 4, Greenland’s is 125 and Antarctic’s ice is 1,250. To make it clear, the Arctic only means 0.07 per cent of the planet’s ice volume while the Antarctic has 91 per cent of the total, Greenland having the remaining 9 per cent, rounding up. The Arctic’s ice surface is very unstable and is subject to enormous natural variations between its winter maximums and summer minimums, when ice shrinks by 75 per cent every year. Since 1979, first year in which we counted on satellite data and a particularly cold year (the Earth suffered global cooling between 1940 and 1975), the Arctic’s average ice volume has decreased between 25 and 30 per cent. Causes are not as obvious as they may seem and they include poorly understood phenomena such as oceanic oscillations and its currents. Air temperature in the Arctic dropped indeed from 1979 until 1993, then rose until 2005 and has remained more or less stable since then, while oceans’ water temperature, on which we only have reliable data since the deployment of the Argo floating buoys’ system between 2000 and 2007, has only increased by 0.02°C per decade (in other words, nothing at all), the northern hemisphere having cooled. Raw data from Argo buoys showed a slight cooling of the world’s oceans, but they were ‘adjusted’ upwards because the cooling, of course, didn’t fit within the global warming’s dogma (these suspicious adjustments, always made in the same direction, are nor infrequent). By the way, the melting of Arctic ice, which floats, does not increase the sea level in any meaningful way (Archimedes’ principle).
Greenland was an island with pastures when the Vikings settled in during the Medieval Warm Period (10th-14th century), period of time, surprise, in which the planet’s temperature was higher than today’s. Greenland’s 2.5 kilometres thick ice sheet is melting down at an imperceptible pace, with the estimation that over the next 100 years it will have lost 0.8 per cent of its volume. And what about the inhospitable Antarctic, where the coolest quarter average temperature is 65°C below zero and whose temperatures remain stable since 1979 (another uncomfortable fact)? Lo and behold! A 2015 NASA study based of satellite data concluded that the Antarctic had been gaining ice for almost three decades to the tune of 100 billion tons annually (entailing that the Antarctic has been taking oceans’ water away). But, wait a minute: what about that enormous iceberg that cracked a few months ago? Is it not irrefutable proof of the melting of the Antarctic ice caused by global warming? Well, no: Dr O’Leary, the glaciologist responsible for project MIDAS which studies in the Antarctic the impact of global warming on the ice sheets, publicly said that it was ‘a natural event with no link to human-induced climate change’ (I suspect, dear reader, that you did not read these statements in any newspaper). Let me just tell you a funny anecdote. A couple of years ago an expedition composed of scientists and ecologists chartered a ship to check the thinning of sea ice surrounding the Antarctic continent. They could not reach their destination… because the ship became trapped in the ice. An icebreaker was sent to the rescue, but could not reach them… due to the ice thickness. Finally, they were evacuated by helicopter, which of course used fossil fuels. No ecologists complained.
In conclusion, evidence shows that the planet’s ice sheets are melting at a natural pace that fits perfectly within the interglacial period that we are in, a pace so incredibly slow that it would take around 200,000 years to melt completely.
Naturally you would have heard of the rising sea levels argument. We have all watched films in which a gigantic wave wipes out the city of New York. How much of it is a founded fear and how much is fiction? We know that since the last ice age (18,000 years ago), sea levels have risen around 120 metres, even though 6,000 years ago the rising drastically slowed down. Allow me to introduce you to one of the greatest experts on this topic, the geologist Dr Nils-Axel Mörner, former head of the Paleogeophysics Department at Stockholm University and former president of the INQUA Commissions on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution, who has been studying sea levels for 40 years and has published 547 articles on this topic in specialised scientific journals. This expert has been saying for years that although from 1850 to 1940 the sea level rose 1 millimetre a year, field observations had shown that since then there had been no further increase (this being confirmed with satellite’s recent raw data): ‘if one goes around the world, there is no sea-level rise to be found, but they need to show a rise, because without rise there is no fear of death’. Dr Mörner was amazed to learn that a ‘correction factor’ of said satellite data had been established for the sea level to show a raising trend, which, according to Dr Mörner, was an actual ‘falsification of data’ (does this sound familiar?). Dr Mörner was appointed head of the Maldives Project, which claimed to demonstrate that the archipelago was drowning (due to global warming). In his expeditions to the islands, he found no evidence whatsoever behind the theory, but the government of Maldives silenced the publication of the results because they ‘would lose money’, that is, UN funds that they were expecting to receive for being ‘victims’ of global warming. Even those reports more prone to the environmental movement show that over the last 100 years sea level have probably risen between 1 and 2 millimetres a year. If we stand by the lower range of this growth rate, sea levels would have risen half a metre, a bit over two spans, since Columbus discovered America. That is, over a period of 500 years. May I suggest you do not lose sleep over this?